Rachel Rowen has the perfect setup. As a solo esthetician, her Ventura, California-based skin care business, Rachel Rowen Perfect Skin, is located in a Victorian house in a beautiful neighborhood where she co-locates with an award-winning hair colorist and precision cutter. Her private treatment studio is enormous and has plenty of room for all of her tools and products. That, along with her incredible ingredient knowledge and skin care training, officially makes her the esthetician who has everything. So it may be hard to believe that less than 20 years ago, she found herself nine weeks pregnant and suddenly paralyzed at the bottom of a mountain embankment after a horrific car crash that eventually became the turning point of her life.

Before the accident, Rowen had completed her undergraduate degree at San Francisco State University in 1988 and became a school teacher to help put her husband through medical school. However, she soon changed careers to focus on skin care. “My husband decided to focus on dermatology, and I was a guinea pig, just like every wife of a medical student. I changed careers, became a medical assistant and opened a medical practice with him. For the greater good of the family, I went into it and fell in love with it.”

It was during this time that the accident happened, leaving Rowen paralyzed and pregnant ... and soon, divorced. “We were married so young, so when the real world hit, he couldn’t handle it, so we divorced,” explains Rowen, who spent a month in the hospital and then was driven by ambulance to her parents house, where she courageously made a choice to persevere. “I knew I had two kids to take care of and was not going to be a victim,” says Rowen, who was already the mother of a 2-year-old who survived the crash with her, and the baby she was pregnant with.

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